The Japanese is shown as italicized romaji, which is also a hypertext
link to an image of the real Japanese. Selecting that link will call up
a GIF of the Japanese, and will be displayed in a system-dependent manner
(on my system, the image is shown in a separate window).

Try it on the example above. Clicking on the nirinsha should result
in appearing in some way or another.

Inlining the Japanese Text

Optionally, you can have all the images inlined, such that the display
might appear as:

Image inlining is not the default, as some queries might result in
hundreds of entries requiring hundreds of image transfers, potentially
taking a long time. If, however, your browser has the ability to
delay image loading, as my system does, inlining the images can be very
convenient. One can then click on the icon next to the romaji of the
individual Japanese entry you'd like to see to call up just that image,
which will then replace the icon inlined within the text.

If an entry's romaji has an appended ``*'', the entry's Japanese is
all-kana. This can be useful information - knowing that you'll not be
shown kanji can help in the decision to not call up the Japanese text image.
Because seeing the actual Japanese for a kana-only link doesn't
provide all that much extra information, they are not inlined unless
you explicitly ask for it (which you haven't with your current
configuration). Of course, as with all entries, you can still the
Japanese for individual entries (including kana-only) by clicking on
the romaji.

Inlining can be turned
on
by clicking on the inline box on the main query page.

It's not really very efficient, but if your browser doesn't support raw
Japanese text (check here for info on how Japanese text can
be encoded, and here for an example of some raw text),
there's not much else that can be done (except to use a
browser that supports Japanese).

It's my understanding that most recent versions of Netscape Navigator
can support Japanese. All versions of Mozilla and Firefox can also support
Japanese. They should work with my pages automatically (once you
tell my server to feed it Japanese, which you can do from the gateway or
customization pages) -- if it does, but you find it doesn't work with
other pages using Japanese text, you may well have to adjust the
[Options/Language Encoding]. My pages will do this for you automatically.

So anyway, without raw Japanese support, the best we can do is send the
text as images. The
default appearance of the Japanese text images in query results is white
text on a transparent background (if your viewer supports the GIF89a
standard, a black background otherwise), with characters 26 pixels square.
You can change these defaults by selecting the appropriate items in the
form on the main dictionary
page.

Color

You
can select ``white foreground'' or ``black foreground'' from the
Japanese text colors selection on the main page. The background
will be transparent (i.e. use your window's background color) if your
viewer supports it, the foreground's opposite otherwise. You can also
choose to have a background colour present instead of a transparent background
to do some funky things, but there's no accounting for taste so don't blame
me. Going one step further, you can also chose to have the image inverted,
that is, the foreground colour can become transparent, with the background
colour taking on the former foreground colour. Note however that if you
define a background colour other than black, then the colours will be reversed
(think reverse video), not the transparency To get a transparent foreground,
select black as the background colour and check the ``invert colors'' checkbox.

Size

Also on the main page, you can select from a number of font sizes:
18 pixel, 26 pixel, 48 pixel, 64 pixel and 96 pixel.
Selecting a size is a compromise between a number of things:
Readability:
The kanji for nihongo (``the Japanese language'')
can be rendered by this server as small as

or as large as

You'll probably find that one is a bit easier to see than the other.
Visually pleasing integration with your local (i.e. English) fonts.
Access speed:
characters from larger fonts take more time to
transfer, although it seems that most of the time is in the per-image
transfer overhead. In practice, a 48 bit font should result in
images about four times larger than a 16 bit font, but access
doesn't seem to be all that much slower.... the main time cost is in the
per-transfer overhead.

There's also the option of having the server emit Japanese text as images
in a vertical manner. In the server's case, this is done by rotating each
character counter-clockwise 90 degrees before generating the image. While
this leaves you the work of rotating the whole image clockwise using
an image manipulation program, doing it this way saves from creating
a messy presentation on the screen. As this process is a bit
calculation-intensive, you'll need to wait longer for the images to be
generated as they load into your web browser.

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